


Love Potion No. 9

by eldritcher



Series: Pandemic [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Love, M/M, Romance, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:40:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29079507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher
Summary: In which Abraxas ends up with a lover, though he wasn't looking for one.This is a B-side toPandemic.  Written from Abraxas's perspective.
Relationships: Abraxas Malfoy/Tom Riddle, Abraxas Malfoy/Voldemort
Series: Pandemic [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2137872
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	Love Potion No. 9

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Pandemic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28860678) by [eldritcher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher). 



**Act I: Love Potion No. 9**

  
They had not moved me from the hospital wing at Hogwarts, afraid to cause further deterioration to my condition. 

My father had summoned the best healers from all corners of the world. He had even deigned to consult Muggle doctors, to see if the newly developed vaccines could avail me. 

Each time I faded in and out of consciousness, I registered my father's presence, sleepless and frightened, by my bedside. Occasionally, Slughorn visited. Once or twice, Headmaster Dippet had come by. 

Polioasis. Polio.

It had begun from the legs, weakening them first, and then in a matter of mere days paralyzing them. 

Then it had spread through my body. Every breath was wrought with pain. Every blink of eye and swallow cost me. 

"It attacks the central nervous system." 

Riddle was an oddball. He kept to himself in our early years at Hogwarts. Then he had begun trading favors with others: homework for gold or precious artifacts. The Magpie of Slytherin, they called him. 

His path and mine had crossed infrequently in the beginning. I remembered how he had looked at me when I had endeavored to put an end to the bullying from all Houses targeted at him, when he had been a starveling runt come to us, with neither name nor father. His bright eyes had been full of awe. Nobody, I realized then, had protected him before, without asking for favors in trade. 

We had not become friends afterwards, but we were closer than acquaintances. 

If I could speak, I would have asked him to read to me. His voice was a comfort, mellow and detached as it was even when reciting the goriest of ancient tales.   
  
"I brought a gramophone for you," he continued softly. 

I wished he would step closer to me, so that I might see the form of him once more. He would not cry, as my father did. He would not mourn, as my father would. Would he come to my funeral, and watch the proceedings mellow and detached? 

I wished I had thought to tell my father to fund Riddle's studies, before my health had abruptly failed, before I lay on my deathbed. He loathed and feared that orphanage he refused to speak of. 

"These are old records," Riddle was saying. "Blues. R&B. I-" he cleared his throat.

It had begun recently, his fledgling attempts to speak of himself, of his trivial likes and pleasures. 

Oh, he was a sweet talker, and charming too, when he willed it, wearing his masks as effectively as if they were skin. In our years together, he had begun to thaw, to dare to unveil himself on the rare occasion, almost helplessly, as if lacking volition. 

I wished we had had more time. I wanted badly to see the truth of him, and to hold it safe in secrecy. 

Perhaps there would be another. Perhaps there would be another who chose to protect him, even if nobody else could look past the masks to the frailties beneath. 

Dumbledore feared Riddle would become the next Grindelwald. Fear blinded Dumbledore to what could be. Riddle was malleable. His ambition, while resolute, was not above succumbing to acceptance. 

I hoped another came, after my death, to carry out the service I could not, to protect this boy, nameless and fatherless. 

The music was unlike anything I had heard before. 

As Riddle, it carried a sense of desperate loneliness concealed in rhythm and cheer. 

"Clovers. _Love Potion No. 9_ ," Riddle said. 

"I like it," I wheezed, even if my voice was a rasp, even if my words were a mumbled slur. 

_She looked at my palm, and she made a magic sign_  
_She said, what you need is Love Potion No. 9_  
  


He stepped forward then. Oh, the sight of him turned my heart on a spit, that dear face of him tear-streaked and hollowed by fright. His mother had died, he had told me once. He could scarce look at me, as I lay there dying. 

"I made a potion," he said, voice trembling in horror. "If it doesn't work, you will die in unimaginable pain." 

"If it works, you must let me teach you dancing," I said wistfully. 

The potion was of dragon entrails and Muggle chemicals, bound by the remarkable power of his magic. It burned me to the gut, and left me howling in pain. 

My father came running to my side. I heard them shouting, a gramophone crashing to the floor, and Riddle screamed as my father's Cruciatus struck him down.

\----

I walked up to the castle, heaving with every breath, cursing my weakness once more. My legs were of little utility on many days, particularly in the winter, but when the weather was auspicious, I would strive to walk as much as I could before I collapsed. 

When I entered our room, I found a cup of hot cocoa waiting for me. My bed was made with neat sailor corners, and there were hot water bottles to comfort me after the day's arduous strain. 

This was his way, I had learned. While he had slowly begun to be emboldened to speak of himself, in these thoughtful acts of service, he was consistent and predictable. 

He came late at night, absently perusing a broadsheet of the Financial Times. He had begun investing the gold he made in his games of favors. I had told him to buy bonds in fisheries, as all the respectable ones among us did. He had laughed and turned to speculating extensively in American Muggle Stock Exchanges. He believed that when the war ended, Americans were best placed to recover, and to assume global superiority, given Britain's diminishing prospects of retaining the Empire. 

Oh, well, let him do as he pleased. I would gladly shelter and feed him if he was penniless once more. 

He inhaled sharply, when he saw the neatly wrapped package on his bed. The happy flush on his cheeks I wished I could paint upon canvas for eternity's view. 

It was a Gramophone. Edison Diamond Disc. Comparison with the living artist reveals no difference, the advert had said. I had had it purchased at an American auction house. It was the last made in Edison's factory. Now that factory, as many others, had been repurposed for the war efforts. 

"The Clovers," he breathed, looking at the vinyl covers. 

"Indulge me."

He laughed, soft and hushed, before wrangling his composure back with effort. I could only bestow upon him a fond smile. 

"Indulge me," I said again. 

He nodded and put on Love Potion No. 9. 

_I didn't know if it was day or night_  
_I started kissin' everything in sight_

I did not know what had compelled him. I could feel the lambent curiosity of his magic turn bold, in _da fiese_ , and he had strode across to where I sat upon the edge of my bed. 

"No," I said bluntly, to spare him. His magic had saved me. His magic sustained me. This half-life of mine, as a man incapable of physical prowess, was not a millstone I wanted about his neck. He was a lonely child. He was growing into a lonely man. Let him take an equal as his one day. I could not give him the nurture he craved for. 

It was then that he spoke of himself, truly and with brash boldness. 

"I chose you," he said, resolute. 

How could it have been any other way? My hands were weak and yet I persevered to clasp them loose about his thin waist, as he bent to kiss me. 

We did not know if it was day or night. We kissed each other, everywhere in sight, and in places beyond sight too. 

_Love Potion No.9_ played on.

* * *

**Act II: The Honeydripper**

He sustained me, with magic, with food he toiled over, with music he carefully selected from record shops. 

In return, I had little to give him. He never spoke of the inequitable nature of our union. 

I endeavored to smooth the path his ambitions took him upon. I endeavored to shield him from the Ministry, exercising my name and influence freely in this venture. 

And when I could, rarely as it occurred, we lay on my large bed of silks and knew pleasures of a lower kind. 

His birthdays were in midwinter's heart. He despised the day, seeing not the beauty it had created. He was content to love. He was loathe to seek it of me in turn. All these years together, and he refrained from believing what was before him. 

I rued that my health was at its worst in the winters. How I wished I could love him at least once on his birthday. The romanticism of it had become compelling in my musings, over the years. 

He was not given to discussing intimacy. However, he had never shied away when asked plainly. Resolved, I summoned him to my bedchamber. 

He waited upon me hand and foot, whenever I was bedridden. My father had called it codependency. This man had split his soul, and had amassed an army. If codependency had curbed his ambitions, I feared to think what the lack of it would have wrought. 

"I want to make love to you on your birthday," I said bluntly. 

He was easy to read, in his silences. The weight and nature of each of his silences was different. This silence was carven of his parted lips, of hastily concealed flame of desire in those bright eyes, of taut tension in his thin form.   
  
"I shall hire a boy," I said. "Let it be my birthday gift to you."

He laughed and let me ramble on, thinking me fantasying as I was prone to. The healers said that it was my way of coping with my inadequacies of physiology, to imagine solutions to my concerns. 

\----- 

The boy I found was scarce twenty-five. He had brawny shoulders and was taller than us. He had brown, cropped hair, and even, pearly teeth. American. 

Riddle faltered when he entered our bedroom and saw the boy.

"Shut the door behind you," I told him. He was too rattled to enjoy this. 

"Put on a record, won't you?" I asked. 

He nodded and put on a record, paying little attention to the task, his eyes still flicking back and forth between the paid boy and me. 

Music had always been our language. In the songs of the Blues, we had spoken to each other of heart's secrets. As if attuned to my mind, the Honeydripper began to play. 

_You dig that lick, You dig that beat_  
_You get knocked out, Right off your feet_

"This is Gabe. Gabe, strip him." 

The hired man went to obey. Riddle stood still, eyes fixed on me, swallowing when thick fingers brushed his skin as he was undressed. 

He was hard. I congratulated myself for having read him right. 

"Come bend over my lap," I asked him. 

If he was startled by the unusual request, he betrayed it not. He walked to where I was seated at the edge of my bed, and neatly bent over my lap. I moved my right hand to cup his nape, and thumbed at the corner of his uncertain smile. I pressed on, until he parted his lips and began suckling on my digits. 

With my left hand, I skimmed the curve of his arse and thighs. 

"Gabe, milk him from the inside. I want him an unfulfilled mess on my lap."

_He's a dipper, the honeydripper_

Gabe hastened to do my bidding. He was paid generously for it. Riddle's mouth fell slack at my filthy words, but his magic was warm in the places where it sustained me, flickering with flames of surprised desire. The novelty of a stranger in our bedroom, and being splayed open before another, had left him reeling, and his responses were beautifully raw, devolved to the purely physical, as he gasped and thrashed and clung to me for dear life. The wet of him stained my robes. Sheened in sweat, reeking of need, whispering my name in chant, he remained irrevocably mine. 

"How would you like to come?" I asked him softly, mopping back the hair plastered to his lovely brow. 

He managed to bring a hand to mine. 

I moved myself supine. He came, moving with little coordination, into my arms, and fell with a sigh into my kiss. I nodded to Gabe. 

The boy took Riddle then, and I held him through the pounding that followed. He was reduced to inarticulate cries, and the filthy squelch of cock in him was an obscene accompaniment to _Honeydripper_. 

When he fell, all I knew was the crescendo of his magic breathing in me, holding me alive in incandescent pain. 

\----

Afterwards, I asked him, "How are you?" 

"There are toys for this." 

"It is man that undoes man," I remarked, cherishing the sweet flush to his face, adoring the artless dishevelment of him upon my blue silks. "I should very much like to re-enact this."

"Let us do that again," he said, laughing, bashful, and clumsy in the swift kiss he pressed to my cheek. 

We folded into each other's arms, and _Love Potion No.9_ played us to sleep. 

* * *

**Act III: Pennies from Heaven**

"A Seer?" 

"Yes," Narcissa confirmed. "Severus says that Dumbledore takes the prophecy as significant."

"It is a prophecy," I said, perplexed. "There are hundreds on the Ministry shelves, about everything from who shall win the next Quidditch Cup to the price of bread. Few have come to pass."

"He has been...attached to the idea," Narcissa said delicately. 

This girl I had married my Lucius to, she was dutiful and clever. They had known each other from childhood, and had not taken to each other romantically, but she had become ours, belted and bound in marriage if not in heart. I had grown to rely upon her sweet nature in these days of agony. 

Riddle wanted to end the war. Once or twice, when he had been desperately striving to cauterize my pain, he had spoken wildly and carelessly of how he wanted to end the war so that we might retire to Dorset, to the little cottage he had built on the cliffs overlooking Swanage Bay. 

He had been seeking ways to accelerate the war's end. He had not the political capital for an election. He had not the numbers to effect a coup. This war of attrition and propaganda, of fathers burying boys still in their school robes with their wands, had taken its toll on us. My health had worsened, as I worried for my son's safety, as I worried for Riddle's safety. As a faithful weather vane, so had Riddle's stress become amplified in turn. 

He had become increasingly obsessed in seeking ways to reach the end. 

"Bring the seer to me," I told Narcissa.

\----

Miss Trelawney was a young woman, pleasing of face and form. Neither plump nor thin, neither tall nor short, she was inoffensive in carriage and presence. 

"Once averted, once evaded, once endured." 

Her voice was harsh and ancient, as if a hundred dead tongues spoke from her mouth. 

Riddle did not know how to interpret prophecies. He had not been raised in an old Wizarding household. So he went on his wild-goose chases, despite my attempts to curtail his imagination. 

I had been raised steeped in tradition.

Once averted. 

My polio had been once averted. It was a contagion that could have spread as wildfire through the school. Slughorn's early assessment, and then Riddle's intervention, had averted that catastrophe. 

Once evaded. Once endured.

There would be two other plagues. 

"Is there somebody else?" I asked the tongues that were channeled by this woman.

"Once of ash, once of hawthorn, once of holly." 

I frowned. Ash. My wand was of ash. 

Hawthorn, as a wand wood, had favored women. Hawthorn was a healer's wand. Hawthorn, they said, healed a broken heart. Muggles planted Hawthorn in their chapel courtyards, to purge the soil of evil. 

Riddle was not one for women.

Holly. Holly was willing sacrifice for salvation. It was a martyr's wood.

It comforted me, that there would be others. 

It frightened me, that the martyr came after the healer. 

Riddle's magic had sustained me since my schooldays. Each breath of mine had been drawn from his magic. He had never spoken to me once about the drain on him. He had never once let on that the pain I endured lingered in his veins too, due to the brash and desperate establishment of our connection he had made all those years ago. 

He had not been raised in an old household. He had not known the cost of parasympathetic magic. He had quietly and unflinchingly paid the price of it. 

I did not want a martyr to love him. A cripple had loved him. 

Let it be a man simple and untroubled, without care or cause. 

"Will he be happy one day?" I asked Sybil Trelawney. 

"Love potion's child, saving love with potion,  
Love potion's child, raising wall to love potion's child,   
Love potion's child, at a world's end, someone's one."

She screamed as the spirts left her, and fell insensate upon my fine carpets. 

\--------------

"Narcissa has acquired the new Merchant-Ivory film," I said. " _Quartet_."

"After I return," he said absently. "It shan't take long." 

He wore his battle-robes. He meant to go to Godric's Hollow. 

"I have been keen to watch _Quartet_ ," he said then.

He was fond of Alan Bates, and I was fond of teasing him for it. 

"Narcissa's hawthorns are in bloom, out of season," he continued. "Most unusual. I promised her I shall take a look this weekend."

"Come here," I said abruptly. "Before you leave, come here and let me kiss you."

His eyes widened in surprise, as he realized I knew the purpose of his errand. 

"You know everything," he murmured. 

"No, I know you," I said quietly. I knew him, and he was superbly flawed in the places he was not perfect. "Put on a record." 

He sighed and went to put on our record on the Edison Gramophone I had given him at Hogwarts. 

_"The world was bright when you loved me_  
_sweet was the touch of your lips"_

I kissed him again and again and again, until his lips were stung red from the force of my attentions. 

"Abraxas." 

"Why must you be so reckless?" I asked bitterly. 

"You know the making of me," he replied, unashamed and candid before me for the first time. "All that has exalted me I behold now." He traced my cheek wistfully. "I mean to live out my life with you, away from this. The war must end."

He kissed me once more, full of sweet promises. 

\-----

I dreamed of hawthorn blossoms and hedges of holly, under a giant ash by a seaside. 

The gramophone played on. 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> [ **Leitmotifs, Themes, and Songs of Pandemic** ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29586945)


End file.
